I guess as this is the first entry I will tell those of you who don't know me and have stumbled across these ramblings by accident a bit about who I am.
I am a thirty year old musician and producer. At thirty I am probably too old, definitely too fat and certainly not fashionable enough to ever become a household name playing the music I write but I'll carry on just the same if you don't mind. If you like the songs then good, if not? You can't win them all I suppose.
My main passion and the thing that means most to me in the world is music, namely the band I play in TAKOMA STAR. We have been playing some kind of punk rock since 2006 and I hope we wont be stopping any time soon.
I have always felt I lead a double life and in many ways I have ever since I was a kid not just because I used to talk shit more than I talked sense (a character trait that does make you as big an asshole as you imagine it might) but I always felt I had to be two people.
When me and my kid brother were young our parents got divorced, it was no great shakes. It didn't scar me or screw me up. In fact I never really understood why people got so broken up about their parents getting broken up.
It did leave me in this strange limbo between two lives though. I was raised mostly in Braintree, a small shit hole of a town in Essex, England. It was a crappy place then and is still a crappy place now even if it was referred to as the punk rock capital of the world once (I think that was just because local legends The Prodigy spiked their hair and added guitar to their mixes) we were piss poor and still are.
Where we lived with our Mum we were the only kids we knew who only had a black and white television (and this is the nineties I'm talking about) we had no carpets and no beds at one point, just mattresses and we had plastic patio furniture in our lounge. This didn't last for long but we weren't living in a palace.
I think I loved it in a way, you could have a party and fuck the house up because there was really nothing to fuck up except some charity shop velvet curtains I have never been forgiven for ruining.
Living like that albeit briefly felt like it validated the fact that I loved punk rock and thrash metal, you felt shit about it and you knew you where different from the other kids.
This never ever got me down, my brother had a different experience to me. Feeling ashamed and embarrassed he never invited friends over and was probably pretty lonely for a lot of his youth. But that's his story and if he wants to share that with you then he can do that himself.
For me it was the opposite. I loved being able to have a gang of friends over and really hang out without a care in the world, smoking weed and listening to or playing music.
So how come I was a middle class kid at the same time? I would be whisked away every weekend to our Dads nice (not huge or posh, just nice) house in a chilled village and we would spend the summer sailing or fishing, we had horses, we always had a new car and life there was pretty good.
It felt weird to flit between the two but it got me used to living as two people in one brain.
Jump to ten years later after many years gigging in many bands I reconnected with some friends from a cool heavy metal band from South America called CRIMINAL.
At the time our paths crossed again they were looking for a bassist. I am a guitarist myself but play other instruments too.
Initially I offered to stand in for any shows they had coming up till they found someone else or whatever they wanted. Five years later I am still in the band and recording my second album of their twenty year career.
Since joining CRIMINAL I have played in countries I never even thought I would visit, to tens of thousands of metal fans and shared the bill with my childhood heroes at various shows around the world.
When I was sat on that mattress in my childhood room staring up at the hundreds of posters and press clippings that covered every inch of my walls and ceiling I never dreamed that some of these people I would one day call my friends others I would be lucky enough to just have met them and had a picture taken while I grinned from ear to ear and the big two, Megadeth and Metallica, I would have played shows with as part of the support band.
This all lead to another double life. Its a very weird feeling playing a show in front of ten thousand people or even fifty thousand plus and feeling on top of the world knowing that within two days you will be back in the same cold factory in the morning doing a repetitive job and freezing your balls off for fuck all money.
I am not and will never complain, I love the fact that I just get to do it. I do it for free when I have to because I love the experience and I wouldn't change it for the world but it still feels strange.
It is also strange knowing that the kids in the front row of a massive show who are jumping up and down and screaming the lyrics at you think you only live one life.
"But you are playing with Metallica in front of 50,000 people. You must have loads of money. You must be a musician full time. You must have a nice car and a nice house right?"
Well kids, it just doesn't work that way now but the dream is still nice.
Thankfully I have almost whittled down my multiple personalities to just one. I am now leading ONE life. Maybe for the first time since I was a small child.
I now DO work in music full time and I love it. I own my own studio (I mean, I will be paying off the debt for years to come but it is a start) and we do have a nice house (mortgaged for twenty five years but who cares).
I get up every day now and aside from the crippling debt I am doing something I enjoy and I cant ask for more than that.
I am living the dream one cat nap at a time.
Thanks for reading this if you made it this far, I will keep this updated sporadically as a diary/therapy session as and when I have something to say.
Take care
Danny B
x
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